“Feel, rest, act... feel, rest, act”
“Feel, rest, act... feel, rest, act”
The Top 10 Insights from the “Science of a Meaningful Life” in 2024The most provocative and influential findings published during the past year
January 3, 2025
By Kira M. Newman, Jill Suttie, Emiliana R. Simon-Thomas, Maryam Abdullah, Elizabeth Hopper, Edward Lempinen, Jeremy Adam Smith After a year that feels like it has pushed many of us apart, our selection of the top scientific insights of 2024 are nearly all about how we come together and how we’re interconnected—across time, distance, and difference.
Some insights speak to the ways we can connect with people with disagree with, and how this process isn’t as painful as we imagine. Others look at the effects parents have on children, teachers have on students, and plant and animal life have on all of us. One insight is simply about an easy way you can reconnect with someone, today. The final insights were selected by experts on our staff, after soliciting nominations from our network of nearly 400 researchers. We hope they inspire you to reach out to others and model the kind of goodness you hope to see in the world. 1. We’re missing out on important happiness insights by overlooking Indigenous culturesDoes having more money make you happier? Research findings on this question have been mixed, with some studies suggesting it doesn’t and others suggesting it does—and the more money, the better.
But a 2024 study by Eric Galbraith of McGill University and his colleagues, published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, offers a new perspective on this debate. And their research—based on smaller, rural, often Indigenous communities—is also a reminder of the people who are often left out of world happiness surveys and other psychological research, and what we can learn from them about well-being. In the study, Galbraith and his colleagues surveyed almost 3,000 people in 19 small communities (mostly in Asia, Africa, and South America) about their life satisfaction, then compared their answers to their level of wealth. Since most didn’t live in a cash-based economy, their income was calculated based on the value of their assets. Galbraith and his team found that people from these communities were very satisfied with their lives—6.8 on a scale up to 10—even though most of them lived on less than the equivalent of $1,000 per year. To put that in perspective, people in the 2022 Gallup Poll (used to create the 2022 World Happiness Report) weren’t generally that happy until they made at least $25,000 a year. The researchers also found that living in a particular village mattered for life satisfaction, and it had nothing to do with the wealth of that village. This means other, non-economic factors likely contributed to the villagers’ happiness—like, perhaps, living in a more interdependent community, being closer to nature, or experiencing lower inequality. Whatever the reason, these findings add more evidence to the debate about the role of money in life satisfaction—and hint at other lessons happiness researchers (and all of us) could learn if psychological research were more inclusive. “Small-scale societies living in close contact with nature, on the fringes of globalized mainstream society, offer distinctly valuable perspectives [on the link between wealth and satisfaction],” the researchers write. Today the reserve is home to 23 breeding pairs of red-fronted macaws, about 13 percent of the species’ total reproductive population, as well as 200 other bird species including Andean condors and peregrine falcons.
This is a great example of how Armonía and other conservation partners in Bolivia are “focused on poverty reduction in the region,” says Tjalle Boorsma, conservation program director for Armonía, “and working together with farmers on sustainable agriculture models like beekeeping or implementing tourism.” The result? People equate protecting endangered species with protecting their own livelihood. Content from
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